A Piece of Proustian Cake

The willowy Gwyneth Paltrow has a cookbook out this month (Lizzie Widdicombe notes the irony in the current issue) and everyone from Martha Stewart to my most domestically-inept friend claims the actress’s recipes are a cinch to follow. Yet just the other night, I burned frozen vegetables and store-bought salsa on my allegedly “nonstick” skillet, causing my deeply sensitive fire alarm to rouse my roommates from their beds. So you can understand why Paltrow’s recipe for duck ragu sounds, to me at least, daunting.

Then I had a madeleine moment! Sort of. Those of you who’ve read (or pretend to have read) Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” know what I’m talking about: when Proust’s narrator bites into a madeleine and sips a spoonful of lime-flower tea, the gastronomic combination suddenly induces in him a forgotten memory from his childhood. My madeleine moment involved a stale ginger shortbread cookie dunked into a glass of vanilla soy milk. Suddenly I remembered my third-grade teacher bringing into class Laura Ingalls Wilder’s recipe for gingerbread cookies. Of course! Literary recipes might encourage me to turn on my gas stove again.

Next, I called that domestically-inept friend of mine and she agreed to join me in giving a few bookish recipes a try. We started with Charles Dickens’s simple-to-follow recipe for gruel in “Oliver Twist”: water, oats, milk, an onion. And guess what? It worked! (“Please, sir, I want some more.”) Gratified, we attempted to fix Elizabeth Berg’s French toast from her novel “Open House”: “mix eggs and milk,” she writes, “in a blue-and-yellow bowl” (my white bowl worked just fine) and “add a touch of vanilla, a sprinkle of sugar” and ta-da! Remarkable deliciousness!

I’d probably burn the apple puffs; maybe Tolstoy’s wild mushrooms and toast would be a better bet. It’s just been reported that reading poetry can lead to weight loss. Here’s hoping literature will help me fit into last year’s swimsuit.